Tahm Kench’s Devour cooldown gets a pretty huge nerf on the PBE

Tahm Kench isn’t terribly popular in solo queue, boasting a playrate under two percent and one of the worst winrates of his role as a support, according to Champion.gg.

He clearly isn’t that strong, at least in the hands of most League of Legends players. So the fact that Riot is about to slap him with a giant nerf on his most powerful tool, Devour, might be cause for concern—especially if you’re one of the few people that play him.

Starting at rank one, Tahm Kench’s Devour will now have a 26-second cooldown, which is almost double his old level one cooldown of 14 seconds. The ability’s final cooldown will now be 14 seconds, so at least by the end of the game, Devour will feel like it used to at rank one originally. Yikes.

There’s good news, though, in that it will now deal a lot more damage to enemies when you spit them out. But who’s going to use this ability offensively when it’s only up every 24 seconds? If you do, you risk not having it when your ally needs it the most, and it definitely won’t be up before the teamfight or gank is already over. Overall, this is still a big nerf.

The other news is that this change might not happen at all. Riot staffer David Capurro said on Twitter that these changes aren’t actually planned until Patch 8.16, about three weeks away. It is a pretty big change, so taking some extra time to work out the kinks, or revert it, is a smart move.

This nerf is undoubtedly geared toward pro play. Tahm Kench is a much more prominent figure there as one of the only tank supports playable right now in the ranged or mage support meta. His Devour is the only thing that allows some marksman champions to remain in the meta, so this might have a ripple effect for bot laners as well.

Balancing toward pro play only, especially with nerfs as large as this one, usually doesn’t feel great for the other 99 percent of players—especially when those players are already struggling with the targeted champion. Nonetheless, if these changes do go live, it won’t be for another three weeks.. So if you’re a fan of the Kench, get some time in on him now.